For a long time the business sector and citizen sector haven’t been playing the same game, they’ve been using entirely different scoring systems: profit vs. social impact. Increasingly, what we are all recognizing is that economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental sustainability must be advanced at the same time if we want to respond meaningfully to our needs.

Social entrepreneurship is an approach that starts to blur boundaries, pursuing a market-based approach that transfers much more than finance from across traditional sectors. While the citizen sector has solutions to address complex social problems, business has distribution systems, customer-centric approaches, scaling methodologies, and technological acumen. To me, the evolution of fair trade and microfinance over the past ten years is an indication of the potential - these models are now maximising both financial returns and social returns. ‘Robbing the rich to feed the poor’ is no longer the only way!

And yet it’s not a golden ticket. Social entrepreneurship is currently benefiting from much hype (and reinforced by a new class of celebrity, see the Ashoka Fellows, or Robert Redford’s New Heroes, or Skoll Foundation’s Uncommon Heroes….) and questions are being raised as to whether it can live up to its promise. After all, it is constrained by a slow moving economic, legal and political framework that supports the status-quo. What’s compelling to me is not that it can change the world by itself, but that it can, and certainly is, challenging how we think about creating change.